With Disney forking over $4 billion for some Marvel and its 5,000+ characters, we here at Blast thought we’d help the two companies think up ways to combine their portfolios.

Here’s what we came up with:

10. X-men meet the Seven Dwarfs

The X-men have always lacked just a little something, but by adding Dopey, Sleepy Grumpy and the gang they pick up seven little somethings in one fell swoop. And if you don’t think the dwarfs are mutants, you haven’t seen Grumpy eat soup.

9. Sub-Mariner meets The Little Mermaid

A couple of nights with Namor and Ariel would never pine for the surface world again.

Do you get the metaphor?

8. Donald Duck meets Howard the Duck

Oh, the (in)humanity!

You have heard of Howard the Duck, right?

7. Bambi meets The Incredible Hulk

Each an orphan in his own way, the purple panted one and the world’s most beloved deer would get along famously — at least, a helluva lot better than Bambi and Godzilla did!

6. Beauty & the Beast meet Wolverine

The two beastie boys battling over Belle? Put some protective covering on the furniture and an extra coat of scratch-resistant polish on the floors!

5. Deadpool meets Dumbo

Teleportation is so overdone. What better way to strike terror in the hearts of your enemies than to come swooping in on a flying baby elephant who cries if you criticize his ears?

4. Spider-man meets Aladdin

You gotta believe smart-alec Spidey and the jovial blue Genie would get along famously. Although with skyscrapers hard to find in the ancient middle east, the magic carpet could get a bit crowded!

3. Iron Man meets Wall-E

I’m sure each has a few spare parts the other would love to accessorize, and imagine the epic quests across the galaxy looking for a 220-volt outlet!

2. Daredevil meets Goofy

The blind leading the congenitally idiotic! At least Goofy could lighten the mood during some of those tense courtroom battles..

1. Captain America meets Toy Story

Could there be two more pompous crimefighters than Cap and Buzz Lightyear? By the time the two of them decide on a rallying cry/motto, all the super villains will have retired.

This is the first of a new line of articles about old-school comic books.

Published since 1940, this venerable “funny animal” comic book has enjoyed 700 issues over 70 years. WDC&S is an important title for many reasons — including the fact that it had the honor of being the home of hundreds of the first and original stories about Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie and the dreaded Beagle Boys written by Carl Barks.

Barks’ stint with WDC&S began with issue 31 in 1943, (the first 30 issues contained reprints of newspaper comic strips by Al Taliaferro) and he didn’t stop writing and drawing at least one feature story in every issue until #312, in 1966. Along the way, Barks created an entire extended family for Donald, including his girlfriend Daisy, his rich but miserly Uncle Scrooge McDuck, his maddeningly lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, the aforementioned Beagle Boys, Grandma Duck, zany inventor Gyro Gearloose and many other characters.

Barks never received credit in the pages of this or other comics on which he worked, but his zany stories and characters and unparalleled depiction of the duck characters earned him fame of a sort even back in the day. He was known simply as “the good artist” because compared to him, no one could really do Donald and the gang justice visually. (As a lad, my mother, who’d been a fan since childhood, raised me right and I quickly learned to discern Barks’ work from the pretenders’ – if the story wasn’t drawn by “the good artist,” she wouldn’t read it to me.)

WDC&S sold in massive quantities, but the characters and stories were so widely popular that most copies were passed around over the years, so finding copies in grades higher than fine is extremely difficult.

Issue #’s 49, 59, 62, and 87 range in publication date from Oct. 1944 (issue 49) to Dec. 1947. ‚ Values for these Golden Age gems vary considerably, with low-grade copies listing for $25-30 or so and high grade copies commanding $500 to $1,000 if you can find them. Issue 167 is from the mid-’50s and is worth considerably less.

WDC&S sold in massive quantities — as many as several million copies of each issue were printed monthly during its heyday. But the characters and stories were so widely popular that most copies were passed around among dozens (or even hundreds) of young fans over the years, so finding copies of the Golden and early Silver Age issues in grades higher than Fine is extremely difficult.